NBA 2K19

UI/ UX Creative Direction

We believe that every experience has to have a soul. While designing the UX for the best basketball game created to date we had to dig deep and call upon the powers of the universe to deliver a truly magical experience.

Roster

When we begin designing we like to start with the features that players will interact the most with and those that have the most information to display. This allows us to figure out the hardest UX challenges first. For the roster we did not want any of the stat information to scroll sideways like NBA 2K18. We also decided early on in the design process that the NBA Superstars need to be the heroes and needed more than a cropped picture. We imagined full body animations ensuring they were always the star.

Team Select

Our design style is rooted in reality and lends well to physical objects or things in the UI being rooted in reality. We designed the logos to be 3D LCD screens that would spin, and float, casting light onto the environment. This effect allowed us to seamlessly transition between scenes by zooming into the logos. The lighting effects actually reveal the environments and allow the objects in the scene to determine how much of the environment is shown. This enables the experience to feel much more immersive rather than having flat floating logos to select from.

Shoe Customizer

Our team had so much fun designing the shoe customizer. We wanted the experience to be simple and intuitive. We wanted it to feel as if you had walked into a shoe store and were able to create your very own customized shoe, right there on the showroom floor.

One of the design pillars we used to achieve the goal of “so real I can smell the leather” was to use very high resolution textures and models. These were both strongly suggested by the UX Magicians design team.

Proving Grounds

The NBA design team asked the UX Magicians to brand the “proving grounds” features. Utilizing our deep background in marketing and branding the UX Magicians design team immediately knew what they wanted to do. By making the NBA stars the heroes of the experience they could seamlessly edit their character using the new and improved editor.

Branded Screens

The NBA 2K design team asked the UX Magicians team to design the sports broadcast screens to be used throughout the experience. We wanted to create a theme that didn’t just feel like an NBA Sport Broadcast experience but one that led, inspired and set a new standard for the NBA.